Praxis Theatre

Date: 2013 June

With the deadline for HATCH 2014 applications coming up on July 12, Praxis and Harbourfront Centre will be hosting a live twitter chat to discuss the HATCH program this year, how work can integrate with social media (which is something we are specifically looking for) and also to field any questions that might be out there.

Praxis started incorporating an open source theatre approach as part of our HATCH residency in 2010, and we hope to add a little of this to how we curate as well. What are you thinking? What are we thinking? Let’s put it all our there and see what’s going on.

On Tuesday we will have a livestream of all the tweets using the hashtag #HatchTO here on praxistheatre.com.

Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.
-William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

IMAGE:

SOUND:

Nina Kaye is the Artistic Director of Unspoken Theatre Company. She is a Jill-of-all-trades, with experience as a playwright, director, producer, costumer, dramaturg, and actor.

Once again, the most wonderful time of the year is upon us. I am not speaking, as Andy Williams was, of Christmas, nor of the start of the school year, as the Staples commercials would have us believe. No, friends, the Dora Mavor Moore Awards are upon us, and it’s time once again for us to gather as a community, celebrate the best work of the season, mutter about who was robbed, and get shit-faced drunk with all of our friends and colleagues.

But looking at all the nominations that have been posted, can we not all agree that among the many worthy commendations, there were a few categories missing? That there is some work missing from the roll call of excellence this season? That perhaps 50 awards are just, at the end of the day, not enough? Allow me to stand before you and say that I believe they are not.

These, in my humble opinion, are some of the awards I would like to see added to the Doras next season.

Outstanding Vanity Project Disguised As Art

I think it’s time we recognized all those people who put so much time and effort into building shows that have very little to recommend them except the opportunity for said artists to put on a show. I think we can all agree that the most difficult part of this project would be deciding the criteria by which it will be judged. What ratio of art to vanity makes for a truly great vanity project?

Outstandingly Irritating Warm-Up By An Actor Or Actress

Stage managers, technicians, and front of house staff are invited to submit videos to the jurors for their consideration.

Patron’s Gold Star Award

Don’t you think it’s time that we recognized the most important people in the arts – the patrons who consume it? The best part is that this award may be given with full irony, so it could go to either the person who was actually a doctor in the house, or the woman who called your front of house manager an anti-Semite because he wouldn’t let her bring a cookie into the theatre. Imagine the suspense!

The Milford Award for Best Technician

Because the best technician, like a Milford Man, is neither seen nor heard, actually showing up to accept this award is considered grounds to revoke it. (BONUS: One fewer acceptance speech to sit through!)

Outstanding Achievement In Social Media Promotion

I mostly just hope that by making this an awardable category, my Facebook feed will become more interesting and less full of uninspired pleading.

Outstanding Efforts Made In Drunkeness At The Postshow Party

Last man standing at the postshow party receives a bucket with a clown on it, and an extra-large poutine.

Oustanding Video Design

Oh, let’s face it: it’ll be 2054 and all actors will be holograms performing on a VR stage before there’s a video award at the Doras.

I’ll see you all on Monday evening, gentle readers. Happy Dora Awards, and may the odds be ever in your favour!

Sarah ‘Pip’ Bradford is the Mainspace Technician of Tarragon Theatre and a lemur enthusiast. She blogs here (tips from pip) and here (The Christopher Pike Project), and also live tweets really bad books @pipbradford #pipreads. She may make fun, but she unabashedly loves the Doras, and she can’t wait to see them again.

Section 98 was Praxis Theatre’s first serious foray into Social Design

By Michael Wheeler

I have been trying to figure out for a while how to explain what my role is on many of the projects I have worked on in the past five years. Although I am usually engaged as an artist in a traditional way, often I have taken on a role integrating these productions with online tools.

Theatre productions employ lighting designers, sound designers, costume designers, set designers and video designers. As productions become further intertwined with online tools, the person in charge of integrating a production with social media is in charge of social design.

Social Design: The strategic implementation of social media to deepen or broaden the nature of an artistic project.

In performance, the shift to communicating with online tools can be understood as a transition from Monologue to Dialogue.

Until recently, one-way communication tools like advertisements, posters, brochures, postcards, flyers, and notes in programs were the ways theatres and artists communicated about their work.

The arrival of online digital tools has redefined this relationship as a conversation. Social media requires interactive, user-generated content. The exercise is no longer how to blast your message at people, but how to encourage them to engage with you.

The type of interactivity a social designer can facilitate can be broken down into three broad categories:

The issues that created the Idle No More movement require extreme methods to achieve change.

Speakers:

Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) is a playwright, dramaturg and director. Her plays include BLADE, Job’s Wife, Video, Annie Mae’s Movement, Scattering Jake, from thine eyes, Ham and the Ram, The Unplugging, The Birds (a modern adaptation of Aristophanes’ comedy. She is the editor of Beyond the Pale: Dramatic Writing from First Nations Writers and Writers of Colour, and of Refractions: Solo, with Donna-Michelle St Bernard.

Directing credits include Justice, Café Daughter (Gwaandak Theatre), Tombs of the Vanishing Indian, Salt Baby, A Very Polite Genocide, Death of a Chief, Tales of An Urban Indian, The Unnatural and Accidental Women, Annie Mae’s Movement (Native Earth), The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (Western Canada Theatre/National Arts Centre), The Only Good Indian…, The Triple Truth (Turtle Gals). From 2003-2011, she served as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest professional Aboriginal theatre. She is currently working on a book on Native theatre in Canada.

Hayden King is Pottawatomi and Ojibwe from Gchimnissing (Christian Island) in Huronia, Ontario.

He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Ryerson University.

In addition to work in the academy, Hayden has served as the Senior Policy Adviser to the Ontario Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, Director of Research for the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business, Scholar-in-Residence for the Conference Board of Canada and Governance Consultant to BeausoleilFirst Nation.

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinabe-kwe mother, curator, image and word warrior from Beausoleil First Nation.

Nanibush has published in FUSE magazine, Literary Review of Canada, MUSKRAT magazine and in the book: This is an Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Blockades amount others. She is an Idle No More Toronto organizer and history buff. ”

Unlike the previous two #CivilDebates, this debate will not be modled on the Parliamentary debate system. Discussion will be broken into five sections:

1

5 minutes from each of the speakers responding to the statement:

The issues that created the Idle No More movement require extreme methods to achieve change.

2

Up to 5 minutes each for each of the speakers to respond to any of the ideas put forward by the other speakers.

3

Reading of 21 Provocative Statements. 7 each provided by by the speakers, but not-attributed.

4

Opportunity for audience members to respond to one of the statements for two minutes. Debaters may also participate.

5

Conclusion. An opportunity to define the final portion of the discussion to discuss any actions, opportunities or ideas have been illuminated by the discussion.

Andrew Kushnir with Julie Tepperman, Mayko Nguyen and members of the Ensemble in Passion Play. Photo: Keith Barker

The Canadian premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Playbegins tonight! Produced by a tryptic of indie theatre companies Outside the March, Convergence Theatre and Sheep No Wool, Passion Play explores the collision of religion, politics and theatre and the impact playing iconic biblical roles has on individuals and communities. Outside the March’s Katherine Cullen explores the meaning of the word ‘passion’.

The word Passion is an ambivalent word. It has a few somewhat contradictory meanings. According to ye olde, Online Etymological Dictionary Passion can mean the following:

Passionate (adj.): “early 15c., “angry; emotional,’ from Medieval Latin passionatus “affected with passion,” from Latin passio. Specific sense of “amorous” is attested from 1580’s. Replaced Old English polung, literally “suffering” from polian (v.) “to endure.”Sense of “sexual love” first attested 1580’s; that of “strong liking, enthusiasm, predilection” is from 1630’s.

Maev Beaty as Queen Elizabeth. Photo: Keith Barker

Suffering, pain, emotional, desire, love. That’s a real cross to bear for one word. Its various meanings bring forth a varied pallet of human emotions that speak to a duality of experience. It is possible that the word Passion contains in it, then, a promise of what it means to be human: to live in a state of utter ambiguity and vulnerability.

In many ways, Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play explores this social and historical drive of human beings to eradicate this ambiguity from our experience. One way to clean up the mess of human nature is to impose rules and order through various ideologies (organized religion, monarchy, political systems), icons (Jesus, Queen Elizabeth), and leaders and dictators (Hitler, Ronald Reagan). That way we don’t have to feel our passionate discomfort. To be told how to think and act can be easier than thinking for yourself.

To legitimate and sanctify only certain modes of being closes down the countless ways that we perform our humanness. There is a massive ethical price to be paid for the eradication of our inner diversity. Some of the characters in this play step outside the boundaries of arbitrary power and pay for it with their sanity or their lives.

For such an epic play, the show has a real humility to it. For one, it is very funny and never takes itself too seriously. There is a lot of room for humor when people are trying to fulfill roles they are not suited for. Maybe it is in these moments of laughter where ambiguity can live unencumbered by our desire to separate the black from the white.

On a personal note, this play reminds me of being a child. Child-logic is different from adult logic. I remember accepting all kinds of ridiculous notions to be true (i.e. imagining that if I held my breath I would become invisible and could eat as many cookies as I wanted with my mom in plain sight. Didn’t work out the way I planned). I miss that way of thinking, even if it didn’t get me the results I wanted.

In the world that Sarah Ruhl has imagined, there are “big beautiful fish puppets” that carry people off in “enormous boats.” It reminds me of lullabies and bedtime stories. It reminds me that dreamland can merge with reality, and magic feels strangely possible. Maybe this is the place where we are best equipped to handle ambiguity.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his ending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.– William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 –

Celebrity Theatre

“After the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations, we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.”